UN climate meet scores high

The next challenge will be to ensure firm commitments in time for the crucial round of UN climate talks in 2015.

It was always meant to be more about marshalling enthusiasm for a cause than making firm pledges. And, on that front, the United Nations-convened climate summit on September 23 delivered.

Held in New York, it attracted an array of world leaders, activists and celebrities, who expressed grave concerns about the dire effects that unmitigated climate change will have on the wealth and security of future generations and on vulnerable ecosystems. 

Others, however, were left fretting that the world is still doing little to prevent emissions of greenhouse gases from accumulating at a rate that may soon cause severe climatic disruption. 

The next challenge will be to ensure that the enthusiasm generated at the meeting translates into firm commitments in time for the crucial round of UN climate talks. The goal of the meeting, scheduled for December 2015 in Paris, will be to agree on a more ambitious successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol: Parts of it have now expired, and the US, then the largest emitter, never ratified it. Though the Paris agreement will be less prescriptive, the goals are to include more countries and to make deeper cuts to emissions. 

The meeting in New York was about revving up support ahead of the Paris meeting. “The fundamental purpose was not to negotiate an agreement, but simply to provide support and encouragement for the negotiating process,” says Robert Stavins, an environmental economist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who chairs the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements. “The presence of, and positive statements from, over a hundred heads of state more than fulfilled that purpose.” 

Following a first term in office that achieved little on the climate change front, Obama had promised after his re-election in 2012 to make the issue a priority, and in June, his administration announced CO2 regulations for all existing US power plants. Meanwhile China, now the world’s biggest single CO2 emitter and deeply concerned about worsening air pollution, has launched market-based schemes aimed at cutting emissions and is heavily investing in clean energy technologies. 

The New York meeting produced some pledges. China said it will cut by 45 per cent the carbon intensity — the amount of emissions per unit of economic output — of its rapidly growing economy. However, experts say that China’s target may sound more ambitious than it actually is since energy intensity tends to naturally decline in maturing economies. 

Rich countries also promised to help mobilise public and private money to finance clean energy in the developing world and help poor countries adapt to climate change. By 2020, a Green Climate Fund, launched in 2011 by the UN, is to channel up to $100 billion per year into low-emission technology and climate-resilient development. 

Carbon budget 

“World leaders seem to accept now that climate change is a severe threat and that emission cuts are not necessarily inconsistent with economic growth,” says Glen Peters, a climate policy expert at the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo. 

According to greenhouse-gas emission data published just ahead of the meeting, the world is now on track to substantially exceed the 2 degrees C limit (above pre-industrial temperatures) which has been widely accepted as a threshold to “dangerous” climate change. To have a 66 per cent chance of keeping clear of that critical threshold, countries must collectively emit no more than 1.2 billion tons of CO2 from 2015 onward — far less than the volume of known fossil fuel reserves. 

Overall, emissions would need to decrease by an average annual 5 per cent over the coming decades to stabilise the climate. In fact, global emissions are currently rising by about 2.5 per cent per year and are expected to reach a record 37 billion tons in 2014. At that rate, the remaining carbon budget will be exploited within less than 30 years. 

“The challenge is clear, but political declarations at the meeting lacked both detail and ambition,” says Malte Meinshausen, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. It is still unclear, for example, how and by whom national commitments within the envisaged Paris agreement — which is likely to have only limited legal force and will rely on countries suggesting their own emissions targets — will be reviewed and enforced. 

The fact that pledges made so far will not suffice to limit the average global temperature increases to 2 degrees C is “unfortunate, but not of the greatest importance,” counters Stavins. 

“The negotiating countries are making progress towards reaching a new hybrid agreement that will apply to all countries under a common framework,” he says. “This is of exceptional importance, and it is why I believe the probability of reaching a meaningful agreement is better now than it has been in more than 20 years. ”